Green Light for New York?

Shortly after New York City's Mayor Robert Wagner swore in his new traffic commissioner last week, the newcomer told the mayor: "You'd better hold onto your hat. You're in for a shock. I can guarantee you're gonna see things you never saw go on around here before."

The man making these spacious claims is Henrym A. Barnes, 55, one of the best traffic engineers in the nation. He has to be, for as any native (or visitor) will testify. New York City traffic is really something. Never one to underestimate his worth, Hank Barnes demanded a $30,000-a-year salary and a free hand before he would accept the job. He settled for $27,500 and--he says--the free hand.

Scramble Plan. Barnes broke in, appropriately, in Flint, Mich., a city that over the years has produced 11,197,000 cars. In 1947 he was called to Denver. In his first four years, he installed 30,000 traffic-direction signs along Denver streets, cut down big street-corner trees to improve visibility at intersections,

roiled taxpayers, drove some motorists into paroxysms of fury by putting in oneway streets ("Look, sonny," bawled one oldtimer to a cop who stopped him. "I've been driving this way on this street for 20 years, and no traffic engineer is going to stop me now!"). On downtown street corners, Barnes instituted the scramble plan (first tried in Vancouver, B.C. in the late '30s), in which all traffic lights turn red and the pedestrians are permitted to cross every which way till the lights switch back to normal red-and-green sequence. The plan was instantly labeled "Barnes's Dance," but it worked.

Biggest Jam. By 1953 Denverites were proud of Barnes and reluctantly let him go when Baltimore asked him to take on its spectacular traffic problems. There he set up intricate communications systems to help in spotting troubles. A sharp troubleshooter himself, he frequently got into his car and told his driver: "Go find me the biggest jam there is going on in town right now." Once there, Barnes doped out improvements or corrections on the spot. "I never saw a traffic snarl yet that you couldn't do something to remedy," he says.

Often he rode incognito in taxicabs just to tune in on hackies' grumbles. "When the gripes are scattered around," he says, "things are going O.K.; it's when the cab drivers all complain about the same thing that you know something is wrong." He clocked 30,000 miles a year in his car, was on hand at every four-or-more-alarm fire in the city to quarterback traffic control ("anything that obstructs traffic is our concern"). He installed an elaborate electronic control system, which enabled him to play the city's traffic lights like a color organ, speeding traffic flow in one direction or another to cope with rush-hour jams and special congestion, e.g., around the baseball stadium on game days.

A cigar chomper with a penchant for corny office signs (he has a "Panic Button" near his desk, and a sign that reads ARE YOU HERE WITH THE SOLUTION, OR ARE YOU PART OF THE PROBLEM?), Hank Barnes has already told the New York City traffic department that he will require both a day and a night driver for at least the next six months.

In all likelihood, Barnes will also get the city to sink a lot of money into an electronic-brain control system, which scans traffic flow by radar and switches street signals accordingly. Barnes likes well-marked lanes. When he wants one, he creates it right away with improvised dividers made out of used paint cans; markings and concrete follow later on. He is also a stickler for overhead traffic signals for every lane (and not just every street corner).

Says Barnes: "Basically, New York's problems are the same as any other city's; they're just bigger." Then he smiles, shifts his cigar from corner to corner, and barks: "Think of it: the biggest city in the world, and not one radar-actuated traffic signal! Oh, there's going to be changes, all right!"

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